“Next time you go to sleep don’t let the rats share your bread,” Falstaff guffawed.
Stratford
May 23
Falstaff helped me find an old cloak and helped me borrow boots and gloves. He got me a stagehand job. Later, he showed me where I could purchase stolen things, sharing his room with him: ribaldry, punning, gargantuan laughter, thievery, friends, foolishness, foppery, wit and wine. Little did I think of using him in a play during the weeks I lived with him. In those days, I had never written a line.
Like an umbrella, his character sheltered me from depression: he introduced me to Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson. Years later, I introduced him to Alleyn and Burbage; Burbage wanted him on stage but Falstaff had his own stage where he could dupe and bedevil, unmolested by paid gapers. By then, he was getting old and liked puttering and sleeping best.
Those were mad times, those days with Falstaff, and yet, behind every laugh lay the threat of poverty, the knife blade of quarrels, reason gone unreasonable. Night after night we went to sleep hungry. With glue and nail we pieced our shoes together, for one more day. With needle and thread we patched our clothes. Falstaff pulled my wisdom tooth to save the barber’s fee: “Open wide, yell! There, I’ve got it, Will, spit now. Spit, boy.”
In a few ways Falstaff resembled my father: both were unassuming, generous, dilatory: their fat portraits hang side by side in my mind: the last I heard from my friend was a brief word from Dover where he was working for a shipbuilder and lived in a shanty by the sea.
He would have roared at his role in my plays: he would have objected to his cowardice, upheld his zeal, begged me for a thousand pounds, and tried to bribe me for the address of a pretty woman.
Friend...you were eel-fish, bull’s pizzle, dried neat’s tongue and stockfish! When you were born the front of heaven was full of fiery shapes and the goats ran from the mountains.